WhatsApp Messenger was banned by a judge at the request of the Brazilian authorities, the messaging application being blocked for 72 hours in Brazil, this not being the first time that such a decision is taken in the country against the network owned by Facebook.
The judge's decision against WhatsApp Messenger it was taken after the authorities tried to obtain relevant conversations in an investigation targeting drug traffickers, WhatsApp stating that they do not have access to the respective messages sent by those under investigation.
Conversations made through WhatsApp Messenger they have been encrypted for several weeks, those from WhatsApp not being able to access them at any time, and this brought them problems in Brazil, blocking access to the messaging network being imposed by mobile phone operators and internet service providers.
WhatsApp Messenger has over 100 million users in Brazil, i.e. 10% of the total worldwide, and the action of the authorities is extremely important, but despite the seriousness, WhatsApp will not change its conversation security policy.
Yet again millions of innocent Brazilians are being punished because a court wants WhatsApp to turn over information we repeatedly said we don't have. Not only do we encrypt messages end-to-end on WhatsApp to keep people's information safe and secure, we also don't keep your chat history on our servers. When you send an end-to-end encrypted message, no one else can read it – not even us. While we are working to get WhatsApp back up and running as soon as possible, we have no intention of compromising the security of our billion users around the world.
Given that most text messaging networks have encrypted conversations and data transfer between users and their servers, we will certainly see similar actions in the future against other companies, not just WhatsApp.
